[T-Mobile Samsung Galaxy Note II] cobraboy85:
So, over the past, well I don't know how long... ever since I started using my galaxy s III back in July, I have seen these threads pop up, and more so recently (to be quite honest this is a disheartening thing to see, and can easily be prevented, but we'll get into that) that say "hAlp ma service is teh failll I kant haz no moAr IMEI!!!" -__-

What is lacking in most of these threads, situations, occurrences, whatever you wanna call them - user error, lack of responsibility on this forum of the developers around here (myself included) to instruct people from step 1... BACK UP YOUR EFS PARTITION! There are many ways to do this, terminal emulator, the andromizer app, some handy tool I have seen floating around here where you connect your device to your computer, open it up, so on so forth. Everybody should be doing this. Everyone. But that is hardly the issue, nor the point of this thread - (pointing fingers).

Last night after seeing ANOTHER one of these threads where somebody had lost service to their device, costing them a good amount of $$$ now, it dawned on me that maybe, just maybe, the issue isn't that the partition is actually being corrupted, but maybe there is a problem occurring where the device doesn't actually read it - some type of failure or registry during booting. All of these instances have had one thing in common - the IMEI mysteriously disappearing and no service issue happen after boot up. And not necessarily after doing any 1 particular thing... granted yes, flashing a ROM, but that should have nothing to do with your IMEI not registering on a network unless said ROM has some kind of issue/bug whatever where it is simply not displaying such information in the status bar (unlikely, but who knows at this point, right?)....

Again, back to last night... I was curious to see if I could duplicate this issue that a user reported where they had flashed a kernel and their IMEI had disappeared. So, I picked some random kernel from asylum that carried the same 7500 device ID that my currently running kernel has of his (running asylumcore)...

Downloaded it, flashed it through cwm, booted up, BOOM! No IMEI. No service. Interesting. Didn't restore my backup of the efs partition which I had made a month ago, for obvious reasons stated - wanted to see if the partition was indeed corrupted, or if there was simply some kind of disk read error.

So I booted back into cwm, flashed back to my other kernel, booted up, and wouldn't you know it, IMEI and service was restored. So what does this mean... this means that the IMEI isn't, hasn't, never was, "lost" per say - there is simply an issue causing it not to be read properly.

So to troubleshoot this issue properly, I need people to pipe in who have "lost" (not really lost) their IMEI's. This is what I need to know:

what version of recovery were you using?

what ROM and kernel were you running right before this happened? Need the revision, android build (jelly bean, AOSP, whatever), everything, details please.

what did you flash or do to the device right before it was gone?

were you able to fix it? - a backup, reboot, reverted back to previous firmware? what?

This will help quite a bit. So far I have been able to duplicate a "lost" IMEI on my own device 4 times in a row, and been able to get it back without any kind of back up. I need some more information from some of you, however, to say 100% what is causing the issue.

Also, since we are already here. I will simply say that developers around here need to take more responsibility in their little "disclaimers"... seriously. If we all know that this is an issue, then we should be instructing people in our ROM threads to take measures to prevent this kind of thing from happening. Especially since at the moment it appears to be random, and especially since there are plenty of methods to be prepared for it. Just sayin.

Something as simple as this:

"Warning, certain users have an anomalous issue of losing their cell signal and having their IMEI not registering. It is highly recommended that if you intend on flashing ANYTHING to your device, that you read threads regarding this issue and furthermore that you make a backup of your EFS partition on your device to prevent permanent cell signal failure - in the event this anomaly happens to you, you will not be without a working device and out $600. Developers are looking into this issue and working on a fix, but as of yet, there is not definite fix. MAKE A BACKUP!"

Then how about a link to that thread for the andromizer app that is not stickied, not looked at ever? Not too hard to do. And would have been nice for those who were suddenly caught off guard by their device turning into a paperweight. Here is the link:

http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=1972757

I am working on a write up right now to fix IMEI issues.